THE WHOLE COLLEGE GROUP PROJECT A year ago, COVID-19 was imminent. In response, the College planned to shut down for an additional week after Spring Break, regroup, and get on with the business of providing education to our students. “When we decided to go remote, more than half of the faculty didn’t have any kind of formal online development experience or training,” says Dr. Angela Sivadon, TCC senior vice president and chief academic officer. “And we were taking everyone online.” Pieces of the puzzle were already in place. The College offers Teaching at TCC, a workshop that helps faculty develop strategies to be successful in the classroom, focusing on teaching, syllabus development, and course planning. Prior to COVID-19, the College pushed that class to adjuncts. Full-time faculty could opt to take an Online Course Developer course to help them design curriculum for online instruction.
amounts of collaboration, innovation and communication between TCC faculty, staff and administration. “We wanted to make sure our students still received that excellent education we promised,” said Sivadon. “We wanted to make sure we were still delivering.” For the Summer, TCC enacted 100 percent online courses. There would be no physical classes on any TCC campus. “We required anyone teaching online to obtain at least Online Instructor Certification and we encouraged everyone teaching to take Online Teaching Fundamentals,” says Sivadon. Lessons learned in the Spring and Summer carried forward, with revisions, into the Fall semester. And it all worked. But it wasn’t easy.
College leadership spent that entire week after Spring Break prepping faculty for online instruction with a newly developed course: Online Teaching Fundamentals, a 40-hour curriculum that enables faculty to design online courses with the assistance of their peers. To date, more than 400 TCC faculty members have completed the course.
Faculty Deliver Dr. Jennifer Campbell is the College’s Faculty Coordinator for Online Learning. As such, she found herself at the center of the faculty pandemic pivot. The picture she paints of Spring 2020 isn’t one of panic, but measured upscaling to meet the needs of the moment. Each step of the journey created new resources.
Faculty were paired, so that for every course, instructors backed each other up. Sivadon called it “peer mentoring.”
“The first thing we did was quite a bit of communicating with faculty,” says Campbell. “We offered resources. Daily Tool Tips sessions had record numbers of attendees. Each session highlighted a technical tool that could help the classroom instructor shift to remote instruction. We normally have a steady interest throughout the year, but the participation in these sessions was up to 800 percent higher than normal. People were all of a sudden really interested.”
“It was great to see the collaboration among faculty as they ventured into this new learning environment together,” says Sivadon. The rapid course development happened in response to demands of the situation, and required enormous
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The College announced its first endowed chair, the Natalie O. Warren Chair of Nursing, funded by the Saint Francis Auxiliary with a matching grant from the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. The Alfred M. Philips Health Sciences Center was dedicated at Metro Campus.
